Book review: Eric is Awake, by Dom Shaw

This is that rare twenty-first century
phenomenon, a novel for heroes. Indeed the author, Dom Shaw, is unfashionably
clear about the heroic, even intrepid credentials required for entering through
the gates of Eric is Awake. He
pretends to be writing about George Orwell’s reputation, but actually, this
might well be how he assesses his own readers’ qualifications for relating to
his hero:

“No one seemed to care very much… What was
he in the end? He resembled someone whose name everyone knew but no one read.
Some of the broadsheet columnist’s jokes were completely missed as the majority
of their readership had the key phrases memorized—‘Big Brother, 1984, some
animals are more equal than others’—but little else. They were limited to these
few cultural clichés because they had never read a complete Orwell novel.”

Muddled? So you should be, for the premise
of this ingenious novel, dedicated to a grandfather “who believed in always
standing up for the working man”, is that when the writer, journalist and
polemicist known to his readers as George Orwell dies shortly after midnight on
January 21, 1950, his expiring breath somehow revivifies a homeless man with a
high forehead and a thin moustache who is dying of hypothermia in an alley
beside an Islington pub on the snowy winter night of January 21, 20--. Hence,
some time in the future, Eric is Awake - in
a north London
still identifiable as such, and yet several scientific inventions ahead of our
current state in 2014.

It is an ingenious plot in many ways,
beginning with the ample excuse it provides for Dr. Who-type forays into past, present and future, encapsulated in
a short quotation in the book’s Prologue from another author who is clearly a
favourite, Seneca, on ‘the Shortness of Life’:

“Life is divided into three periods – that
which has been, that which is, that which will be. Of these the present time is
short, the future is doubtful, the past is certain.”

The awakened Eric of course has to set
about understanding his reincarnation in 20---, a puzzled yet increasingly
determined quest which is recorded in his Fever Diary. We necessarily read this
in double time, getting the two-way joke when his mystified homeless companion,
Pedro, suddenly finds his miraculously recovered old friend introducing himself
to him as Eric, in Catalan: “ I din’t know you speak Catalan, Lewis. You OK?”

Of course at this early stage in
proceedings, we are not going to miss much if we are unaware of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, scene of his
life-changing experience of the Spanish civil war, any more than we will find
ourselves excluded from our appreciation of the austerity-driven recipes for
the homeless that appear almost half way through the novel, if we haven’t heard
of the article replete with recipes Orwell was commissioned to write by the
British Council on ‘British Cookery’ in 1946 (which it was decided not to
publish given the constraints of post-war rationing). Such gems as Earth-Baked
Toad in the Hole Catalunya and Bedsit Soup Recipe appear appended to the ‘As I
see it’ column on the Hackney and Haringey Advertiser (Orwell’s famous column
in Tribune was called ‘As I please’), which is given to the man
who insists that he is the reincarnated George Orwell simply because people
‘rather like the idea, you know, that he’s still alive somewhere, watching us
all’. As a reader, I found myself appreciating the joke, but also adapting
rather too easily to this vision of a future in 20 -- when we will all have to
be more interested in how to live well out of rubbish bins. After all, this is
not too far removed from the recipes to help impoverished students survive
their bedsits to be found in many an austerity-era colour supplement nowadays.

We don’t mind the sense of being nudged
towards these Orwellian references or indeed of having maybe missed them,
because we are offered a generous sense of detail in the plausible
reconstructions of his recollected past, from Orwell meeting Hemingway in 1945
Paris, not meeting Capra, hearing about his wife Eileen’s death in Cologne, or retreating
paranoically to Jura, and because the clues these sequences give us as we
pursue our hero through a range of mutually illuminating discourses, not just
his Fever Diaries, or his gazette columns, but the Preliminary Assessment
reports on ‘Patient E.583’ from University College Hospital which monitor his
recovery, the intelligence reports from Merrett O’Brien, the creepy man at
Border & Control, or the clues that our heroine, Emily, and Pedro hang onto
as they try to make sense of the man in their midst. These feel for the most
part as if they are about something rather more important than a kind of
literary pub quiz.

And I suppose this ‘more important’ thing,
that Eric might well have regretted not being able to do in his first
incarnation, and something, not to give too much away, that he still wants to
do at the end of ‘Eric is awake’ - is
that he could come back and tell us what kind of man can really be a hero for
our times.

Because the whole novel is rather like a
reverse fictional version of Harold Bloom’s Anxiety
of Influence, that well known book of criticism which traces the way that
the Romantic poets desperately pursue originality to get away from their
literary mentors and sources of inspiration. Here instead it is quite clear
that the author only really trusts one man, Eric Blair, the man who became
George Orwell, to read post-modernity in a manly and acceptable way, and that,
as a result the only thing for the author to do is to bring him back to life in
a near future which is close enough to be recognisable, because we really do
want to know, in short, what the man who was a self-acclaimed democratic
socialist and is also a hero for our times, would say.

As you’d expect, it is complicated: being a
hero in the world of this novel is by no means a guarantee of success. Dom
Shaw’s Eric Blair is an endearing mixture of how one might imagine George
Orwell in the flesh combined with Don Quixote, with Pedro as his twenty-first
century Sancho Panza, and a John Buchan hero. His relationship with women is
pretty disastrous, but also very well written. It isn’t often that we are
treated to male vulnerability to women and the unromantic loneliness of a
lifetime’s pursuit of a companion and a sexual partner. This is all the more
impressive since for the most part, our hero as you would expect, is the
morally authoritative commentator, who has all the wholeness of someone with
access to ‘the truth’ – not when it comes to women. Yes, one can’t help feeling
that it isn’t his fault that like Sherlock Holmes there isn’t really much more
for a hero on his own to do than to take down the villain with him as he goes.
Nor his fault if the resulting sense of incompleteness leads to further calls
for his literary reincarnation.

But in this reincarnation, one ingenious
aspect is greatly to his advantage, and that is the intriguing way we are
invited to consider what Orwell might have made of Britain in a future state. 20---
turns out not only to be much more corpulent than the era of his ‘rationed
contemporaries’, but much more entertained, as he reports to the Hackney and Haringey Advertiser, since
the state depends on video games, soap operas, Staycation domes, legalised high
grade opiates and alcohol to ‘distract the population from engaging with the
world in any meaningful manner’. The
most important theme here, as you might expect from Dom Shaw’s substantial contribution
to openDemocracy, is the encounter between his Don Quixote and the
fully-fledged surveillance state. It begins with a rather good joke about how
any future national database might cope with someone who really was, as he
insisted, the long-since expired George Orwell, but gradually takes on an
altogether darker hue.

Perhaps the greatest act of courage on the
part of both the author and his hero is the speech that constitutes the climax
of this tale. This is when both have a go at what the latter would say if he
was given the chance to address a kind of Occupy movement that has become huge
over time, and that now has ‘three and three quarter million people, standing
before telescreens and in parks and squares strained to hear the odd man with
the archaic clothing and curious inflection.” We have been well prepared for
this eagerly awaited moment by Blair’s latest ‘As I see it' column devoted to the ‘growing crisis’ in the ‘Data
Wars’ with its front line outside Warwick
Castle. On one side is a
population, ‘attempting to take back their privacy and their liberty and this,
of course is not acceptable to a Government that has spent many years slowly
encroaching upon both.’ On the other is ‘the Police’ empowered by a Terrorist
Act that allows them to arrest you ‘in the United Kingdom and Europe if a
police officer thinks you look like a terrorist’ and a state that despite
considerable expenditure, ‘has not been able to repair the damage to their
credibility in the face of the systematic leaking of the true casualty figures,
operational errors and abuses committed in China, Iran and Afghanistan.’

Our hero urges those attending the next
great gathering on May 1, International Workers’ Day, to await the outcome of
the ‘very potent message’ the Hoodies have sent to the Government, “There will
be speeches of course, I am scheduled to make one myself, but let there be no
more direct action for now.” So, come the big day, when, “his head appeared on
all the telescreens across the city’ and
“… a rumble of cheering rose and seemed to shake all the pigeons from
their roosts…” What will our hero say
that could possibly rise to the moment?

It is no accident that this was when I was
won over, and convinced by the author’s loyalties, because of course, George
Orwell is remembered, loved and yearned for, above all, for his impeccable
prose, strong and bold, and his heroic unflinching gaze. And here it is:

“The British people, in all their
bloody-minded, cantankerous, class-ridden fury have spoken at last and they
must listen, if only for now. This Government is the last link in a chain of
administration that has finally rolled over everything that gave the state
meaning and power. They have, blindly and irrevocably removed their own
legitimacy. The gap between rich and poor, between the haves and the have-nots
has so widened that those who are supposed to represent us have fatally
increased the number of the disenfranchised. This has been their downfall…

"… if your children kill each other on
the streets because they have no aspirations worth speaking of, if the
authorities no longer police with consent, but suppress and collate your every
movement and communication, if you cannot vote against any of these things
because no party represents your desire, well then, why are we here? Why in the
name of all that we fought for in the last war and beyond, are we here?”

Better far, these two or three pages, than
any last night of the Proms. And I think I might go away and read another of those
Orwell novels now…

You can purchase the book here. You can see Dom Shaw's articles for openDemocracy here.

About the author

Rosemary Bechler is a mainsite editor of openDemocracy, editor of Can Europe make it?, and a member of the coordinating collective of DiEM25.

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